IN THE SPELL OF THE MIRAGE
A quarter of a century is a short time as world history goes, but it
is a considerable era in the life of the Canadian West. More
things--momentous things--than can be hinted at in this narrative
occurred in the twenty-five years following the great inrush of 1882.
The boundless prairie reaches of Manitoba were now comparatively well
settled, and the tide of immigration, which, after a dozen years'
stagnation, had set in again in greater flood than ever, was now
sweeping over the newer lands still farther west. Railways had
supplanted ox-cart and bob-sleigh as the freighters of the plains;
the farmer read his daily paper on the porch after supper, while his
sons and daughters drove to town in "top" buggies, tailor-made suits,
and patent-leather shoes. The howl of the coyote had given way to the
whistle of the locomotive; beside the sod hut of earlier days rose
the frame or brick house proclaiming prosperity or social ambition.
The vast sweep of the horizon, once undefiled by any work of man, was
pierced and broken with elevators, villages, and farm buildings, and
the whiff of coal smoke was blown down the air which had so lately
known only the breath of the prairies. The wild goose no longer
loitered in the brown fields in spring and autumn, and the wild duck
had sought the safety of the little lakes. The pioneer days had
passed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the
land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had
lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less
idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the
hill than there once had been in the sod shack In the hollow.
Mary Harris hurried about her capacious kitchen, deep in the
preparation of the evening meal. The years had taken toll of the
freshness of her young beauty; the shoulders, in mute testimony to
much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening
chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and
streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy
sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution,
half submission. Yet her foot had lost little of its sprightliness,
and the sympathy in her fine eyes seemed to have deepened with the
years.
A moist but appetizing steam rose from the vegetable pots on the
range, and when she threw back the iron door to feed more coal the
hot glow from within danced a reflection along the bright row of
utensils hanging from the wall, and even sought out the brass plate
on the cream separator at the far end of the big room. Through the
screen door came the monotonously redundant clic...a...clank of the
windmill, and a keen ear might have caught the light splash of water
as it fell in the wooden horse-troughs from the iron nozzle of the
pump.
Mary stuck a fork in a potato to ascertain if the "bone" was all
gone, meanwhile shielding her face from the steam with the pot lid,
held aloft in an aproned hand. Having satisfied herself that the meal
was making satisfactory progress, she stepped to the door and sent a
quick look across the fields, to where a streak of black smoke was
scrawled along the sky.
"Beulah," she called, turning toward the interior part of the house.
"Come, Beulah, set the table. They're coming from the field."
In a moment a girl of twenty, plainly attired in a neat calico dress,
entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had
been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something
in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine
sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made
John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She
moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance--a reliance that
must be just a little irritating to men of old-fashioned notions
concerning woman's dependence on the sterner sex--drew the long
wooden table, with its covering of white oilcloth, into the centre of
the kitchen, and began placing the dishes in position.
"I don't see why we can't have supper in the dining-room," she
protested at length. "Before we built the new house we were always
talking about how fine it would be to have a separate room, for our
meals, and now we don't eat in it once a week."
"I know," said the mother, in a quiet, tired voice. "But you know
what your father thinks about it. You know how down he is on style."
"It's no great style to eat in a dining-room," continued the girl.
"What did he build it for? To take off his boots in? That's about all
he does there, nights before he goes to bed."
"Now, Beulah, don't be unreasonable. You know we always have meals
there Sundays. But your father likes the kitchen best when it ain't
too hot. And besides, I can hardly take them into the dining-room
while the ploughing's on. You know how greasy they are with the
engine."
"They're ploughing over at Grant's, too, and when I dropped in there
yesterday the dinner was set in the dining-room, and a clean white
linen cloth on the table, and napkins set for the men, and I guess
they use the same kind of grease as we do," persisted the girl. "And
I noticed when they came in to dinner Mr. Grant and the boys, and the
hired man too, all put their coats on--not their working coats, but
coats they had hanging in a closet handy. It didn't take a minute,
but it looked different."
"Now, Beulah, you know your father would never stand for putting on
airs like that. He--"
"'Tisn't putting on airs. It's putting on clothes--clean clothes to
eat in. Susy Grant never has to feel--I hate to say it,
Mother--_ashamed_ if any of her friends drop in at mealtime. And I
couldn't help thinking how fine Harry looked--"
"'Pon my word, Beulah, I'm beginning to think you must be a bit soft
on Harry Grant. I had thought perhaps your weakness was toward Jim,
but perhaps I'm mistaken."
"Can't a girl say a fellow's fine-looking without being soft about
it?" she continued. "As for Jim--"
But at this moment the conversation was cut short by the scraping of
heavy boots on the ploughshare nailed to the block at the door, and
John Harris, followed by Allan and the hired man, Jim, walked into
the kitchen. The farmer's frame was heavier than in his younger days,
and his hair, too, was streaked with grey, but every muscle in his
great body seemed to bulge with strength. His face was brown with the
prairie sun and wind of twenty-five summers, and lines of worry and
care had cut their tracings about the mouth and eyes. Beside him
stood Allan, his only son, straighter and lither of figure, but
almost equally powerful. The younger man was, indeed, a replica of
the older, and although they had their disagreements, constant
association had developed a fine comradeship, and, on the part of the
son, a loyalty equal to any strain. The hired man, Jim, was lighter
and finer of feature, and his white teeth gleamed against the
nut-brown of his face in a quiet smile that refused to be displaced
in any emergency, and at times left the beholder in considerable
doubt as to the real emotions working behind.
The men all wore blue overalls, dark blue or grey shirts, and heavy
boots. They were guiltless of coat or vest, and tossed their light
straw hats on the water-bench as they passed. There was a quick
splashing of greasy hands at the wash-basin, followed by a more
effectual rubbing on a towel made from a worn-out grain sack. The
hired man paused to change the water and wash his face, but the
others proceeded at once to the table, where no time was lost in
ceremony. Meat, potatoes, and boiled cabbage were supplied in
generous quantities on large platters. A fine stack of white bread
tiered high on a plate, and a mountainous pile of Mary Harris's
famous fresh buns towered on another. All hands ate at the table
together, although the hired man was usually last to sit down, owing
to his perverse insistence upon washing his face and combing his hair
before each meal. Although his loss of time sometimes irritated
Harris, he bore it in silence. There was no better farm hand in the
country-side than Jim Travers, and, as Harris often remarked,
employers nowadays couldn't afford to be too particular about
trifles.
Harris helped himself generously to meat and vegetables and, having
done so, passed the platters to his son, and in this way they were
circulated about the table. Mary poured the tea from a big granite
pot at her elbow, and whenever a shortage of food threatened Beulah
rose from her place and refilled plate or platter. There was no talk
for the first few minutes, only the sound of knife and fork plied
vigorously and interchangeably by father and son, and with some
regard for convention by the other members of the family. John Harris
had long ago recognized the truth that the destiny of food was the
mouth, and whether conveyed on knife or fork made little difference.
Mary, too, had found a carelessness of little details both of manner
and speech coming over her, as her occasional "ain't" betrayed, but
since Jim had joined their table she had been on her guard. Jim
seldom said anything, but always that quiet smile lay like a mask
over his real emotions.
When the first insistent demands of appetite had been appeased,
Harris, resting both elbows on the table, with knife and fork trained
on opposite corners of the ceiling, straightened himself somewhat and
remarked:
"Allan an' me's goin' to town to-night; anything you want from
Sempter's store, Mary?"
"That lets me in for the cows," said Beulah. "You were in town night
before last, too, and it was half-past nine before I got through
milking."
"Oh, well, Jim was away that night," said Allan.
"Jim has enough to do, without milking cows after hours," returned
the girl. "What do you want to go to town for again to-night,
anyway?"
"Got to get more coal," said Harris. "We'll take two teams, an' it'll
be late when we get back."
"Try and not be too late," said the mother, quietly. "You have to be
at work so early in the morning, you know."
"I think it's all nonsense, this day-an'-night work," persisted
Beulah. "Is there never going to be any let-up to it?"
"Beulah, you forget yourself," said her father, "If you'd more to do
you'd have less lime to fret about it. Your mother did more work in
one summer than you have in all your life, an' she's doin' more yet."
"Oh, Beulah's a good help," interposed Mary. "I hope she never has to
work like I did."
"I guess the work never hurt us," said Harris, helping himself to
preserved strawberries. "Just the same, I'm glad to see you gettin'
it a bit easier. But this younger generation--it beats me what we're
comin' to. Thinkin' about nothin' but fun and gaddin' to town every
night or two. And clo'es--Beulah here's got more clo'es than there
were in the whole Plainville settlement the first two or three
years."
"I got more neighbours, too," interjected the girl. Then springing
up, she stood behind her father's chair and put her arm around his
neck.
"Don't be cross, Dad," she whispered. "Your heart's in the right
place--but a long way in."
He disengaged her, gently enough. As Beulah said, his heart was all
right, but a long way in. Twenty-five years of pitched battle with
circumstances--sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never
in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the
problem of income and outlay to be solved--had made of Harris a man
very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years
of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism
still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a
gradual shifting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At
first the settlers attached little value to their land; it was free
for the taking, and excited no envy among them. The crops of the
early years were unprofitable on account of the great distance to
market; later, when the railway came to their doors, the crops were
still unprofitable, owing to falling prices and diminishing yields
due to poor cultivation. Then came a decade during which those who
stayed in the country stayed because they could not get out, and it
became a current saying that the more land a man farmed the deeper he
got in debt. Homesteads were abandoned; settlers flew by night
"across the line" or to more distant districts to begin their fight
over again. And yet, in some way, Harris kept his idealism amid all
the adversity in which the community was steeped; reverses could
neither crush his spirit nor deflect it from its ambitions.
Then came the swing of the pendulum. No one knows just what started
it prosperity-wards. Some said it was that the farmers, disheartened
with wheat-growing, were applying themselves to stock, and certain it
is that in "mixed farming" the community eventually found its
salvation; others attributed the change to improved agricultural
implements, to improved methods of farming, to greater knowledge of
prairie conditions, to reductions in the cost of transportation and
enlarged facilities for marketing, or to increasing world demand and
higher world prices for the product of the farm. But whatever the
causes--and no doubt all of the above contributed--the fact gradually
dawned upon the settlers that land--their land--was worth money.
It was the farmers from the United States, scouting for cheaper lands
than were available in their own communities, who first drove the
conviction home. They came with money in their wallets; they were
actually prepared to exchange real money for land. Such a thing had
never before been heard of in Plainville district. At first the
settlers were sceptical. Here were two facts almost beyond the grasp
of their imagination: that farmers should buy land with money, and
the farmers should have money with which to buy land. True, a few of
them had already bought railway lands at three or four dollars an
acre, but they bought oil long terms, with a trifling investment, and
they aimed to pay for the lands out of the crops or not at all.
But a few transactions took place; lands were sold at five dollars,
six dollars, eight dollars an acre. The farmers began to realize that
land represented wealth--that it was an asset, not a liability--and
there was a rush for the cheap railway lands that had so long gone
a-begging. Harris was among the first to sense the change in the
times, and a beautiful section of railway land that lay next to his
homestead he bought at four dollars an acre. The first crop more than
paid for the land, and Harris suddenly found himself on the way to
riches.
The joy that came with the realization that fortune had knocked at
his door and he had heard was the controlling emotion of his heart
for a year or more. But gradually, like a fog blown across a moonlit
night, came a sense of chill and disappointment. If only he had
bought two sections! If at least he had proved up on his pre-emption,
which he might have had for nothing! He saw neighbours about him
adding quarter to quarter. None of them had done better than himself,
but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness,
the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers
together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and
dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism
that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know
that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even
as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his daughter's arms
about his neck, he felt that he was still bravely, persistently,
pressing on toward the goal, all unaware that years ago he had left
that goal like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, and was now sweeping
along with the turbulent tide of Mammonism. He still saw the light
ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, "When I
am worth ten thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ten
thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five
thousand. He said, "When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have
reached it"; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow
still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to
him to slacken his pace--to allow his mind a rest from its
concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet,
have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of
his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and
John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its
attainment.
So, gently enough, he disengaged his daughter's arms and finished his
supper in silence. As soon as it was ended the men started for the
barn, and in a few minutes two wagons rattled noisily down the trail.
Beulah helped with the supper dishes, and then came out with the
milk-pails to the corral where the cows, puffing and chewing,
complacently awaited her arrival. But she had not reached the gate
when the hired man was at her side and had slipped one of the pails
from her arm.
"Now, Jim, I don't think that's fair at all," she said; and there was
a tremor in her voice that vexed her. "Here you're slaving all day
with coal and water, and I think that's enough, without milking cows
at night."
But Jim only smiled and stirred a cow into position.
"Yes, that's like you," she continued. "Pick Daisie first, just
because you know she's tough as rubber. Say, Jim, honest goods," she
demanded, pausing and facing him, milk stool in hand, "why do you let
father put this kind of stuff over on you?"
"Your father doesn't put anything over on me," he answered. "I'm very
fond of milking."
"Yes, you are--not," she said. "You do it on my account, because
you're too big-hearted to quit before I'm through..." There was a
tuneful song of the tin pails as the white streams rattled on their
bottoms.
"Jim," she said, after a while, when the noise of the milking was
drowned in the creamy froth, "I'm getting near the end of this kind
of thing. Father's getting more and more set on money all the time.
He thinks I should slave along too to pile up more beside what he's
got already, but I'm not going to do it much longer. Mother stands
it--I guess she's got used to him, and she won't say anything, but if
there's anything I'm not strong on it's silence. I'm not afraid of
work, or hardship either. I'd live in a sack if I had to. I'd--"
"Would you live in a shack?" said Jim.
She shot a quick look at him. But he was quietly smiling into his
milk-pail, and she decided to treat his question impersonally.
"Yes, I'd live in a shack, too, if I had to. I put in my first years
in a sod-house, and there was more real happiness romping up and down
the land then than there is now. In those days everybody was so poor
that money didn't count...It's different now."
Jim did not pursue the subject, and the milking was completed in
silence. Jim finished first, and presently the rising hum of the
cream separator was heard from the kitchen.
"There he goes, winding his arm off--for me," said the girl, as she
rose from the last cow. "Poor Jim--I wish I knew whether it's just
human kindness makes him do it, or whether--" She stopped, colouring
a little over the thought that had almost escaped into words.
When the heavy grind of the separating was finished Jim went quietly
to his own room, but the girl put on a clean dress and walked out
through the garden. Rows of mignonette and lobelia bordered the
footpath, and sweet, earthy garden smells filled the calm evening
air. The rows of currant and gooseberry bushes were heavy with green
fruit; the leaves of the Manitoba maples trembled ever so little in
the still air. The sun was setting, and fleecy fragments of cloud
were painted ruddy gold against the silver background of the sky.
From the barnyard came the contented sighing of the cows and the
anxious clucking of a hen gathering in her belated brood. The whole
country seemed bathed in peace--a peace deep and unpurchasable,
having no part in any of the affairs of man.
At the lower gate she stooped to pick a flower, which she held for a
moment to her face; then, toying lightly with it in her fingers, she
slipped the latch and continued along the path leading down into the
ravine. It was dark and cool down there, with a touch of dampness in
the grass, and the balm-of-Gileads across the stream sent a fine
moist fragrance through the air. To the right lay the bench where the
sod-house had stood, not so much as a mound now marking the spot; but
the thoughts of the girl turned yearningly to it, and to the days of
the lonely but not unhappy childhood which it had sheltered.
Presently she reached the water, and her quick ear caught the sound
of a musk-rat slipping gently into the stream from the reeds on the
opposite bank; she could see the widening wake where he ploughed his
swift way across the pond. Then her own figure stood up before her,
graceful and lithe as the willows on the bank. She surveyed it a
minute, then flicked the flower at her face in the water, and turned
slowly homeward. She was not unhappy, but a dull sense of loss
oppressed her--a sense that the world was very rich and very
beautiful, and that she was feasting neither on its richness nor its
beauty. There was a stirring of music and poetry in her soul, but
neither music nor poetry found expression. What she felt was a
consciousness that great things were just beyond the horizon of her
experience, things undefined and undefinable which, could she but
grasp them, would deepen life and sweeten life and give a purpose to
all her being. And as she walked up the path and the fragrant night
air filled her nostrils, something of that wilder life seemed borne
in upon her and sent a fresh spring to her ankle. And presently she
discovered she was thinking about Jim Travers.
Her mother sat in the dining-room, knitting by the light of the
hanging lamp. Her face seemed very pale and lovely in the soft glow.
"Don't you think you have done enough?" said the girl, slipping into
a sitting posture on the floor by her mother's knee. "You work, work,
work, all the time. I suppose they'll have to let you work in
heaven."
"We value our work more as we grow older," said the mother..."It
helps to keep us from thinking."
"There you go!" exclaimed the girl; but there was a tenderness in her
voice. "Worrying again. I wish they'd stay home for a change."
The mother plied her needles in silence. "Slip away to bed, Beulah,"
she said at length. "I will wait up for a while."
Late in the night the girl heard heavy footsteps in the kitchen and
bursts of loud but indistinct talking.